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Morgan was in no great hurry to face up to London. He wished the journey home to be a way of applying a little finish to his daughter. They broke their return first by the shores of Lake Constance, where his younger brother, George, was living in style with an invalid wife, the Baronne de Hildprant. For a sixteen-year-old girl with hardly any understanding of the wider world, this was interesting enough. At Schloss Hard Georgina found the kind of company she had been warned against at the Villa Capponi: indolent, not in the slightest way intellectual, gossipy—and amorous. True to his character, Morgan did not like his brother any more than he did his Florence enemies. On the other hand, his daughter could not be sheltered from the importunities of other people forever. The days at Schloss Hard turned into weeks, the weeks into months, while he watched Georgina try out her new freedoms.

Her looks and personality were of great interest. In appearance she was judged to be perhaps a little too much on the short side, a little too full of figure, to be the ideal of beauty. Her conversation was startlingly direct, and in one respect her aunt and uncle must have studied her with special doubt in their minds. She was already—and particularly among men of mature years—an accomplished sexual tease. Many of the scrapes she got into later in life came from this inability to treat men in a realistic way. She was arch in their company and sometimes irritatingly so. Weak men, or vain ones, might find her little-girl act provocative, but wiser heads found something missing in her, perhaps a commonsensical understanding of the limited choices life could afford, not just to her but to anybody. She was not, in the way the French apply the word, a serious person. Even this early in her life it was easy to see that she had great energies, but many fewer talents than she supposed. She talked far too freely, scoffed and wheedled. She wrote on June 21, at the end of a day of sunshine and persiflage: “I first experienced what Mama told me some time ago about young men making themselves agreeable to me.”

Young though she was, she had discovered the power sex could wield. This amorousness needed some explaining later on in life, and she had a ready answer. She was scientifically amative: “I loved everyone who loved me and there were endless outcomes—lamentations, reproaches, tears on all sides. But there we are! I am a loving person. Phrenologists tell me that my bumps of love and friendship cover my entire head! One is not mistress of one’s temperament and of one’s skull, not at all.”

Even this early, her bumps dictated events in an unfortunate way. Among the party lounging and sketching, going out onto the lake in boats and exclaiming about the wonders of nature, was a familiar family legend, the source of many an outrageous story. He was the fiery and voluble vicar of Llanelli, a man named Ebenezer Morris, whose living had been presented to him by Georgina’s grandfather. The Reverend Mr. Morris was sixty-three and decidedly eccentric. His preaching was considered so entertaining that on one occasion the gallery of the church threatened to collapse from the press of people gathered to hear him. He was also a man of colossal and unforgiving temper, perfectly able to knock down a parishioner for some imagined insult. In his battles with neighboring clergy, he composed scathingly brutal and quite scandalous letters and pamphlets. In Llanelli he was a notorious and much-discussed figure.

As well as flirting with the young men who ran after her and deriding the enthusiasm her uncle held for romantic scenery, Georgina romanced the Reverend Mr. Morris, whom she dubbed Cannonicus. She was successful enough to have him embrace her a little too freely and kiss her without the innocence usually employed toward a child. Emboldened, he wrote her a love letter. One can think of half a dozen reasons why he might instantly regret what he had done. This was the first test of her capacity to behave more like a young lady than a hoyden. Could the situation be defused by tact and common sense? Was this the kind of letter that anyone else would have torn in a hundred pieces or hidden in the trunk of a tree? Was it an occasion for the young to moralize the old and bring the reckless philanderer to the error of his ways, as happened in fiction?

She chose differently. She gave the letter to her mother. Louisa gave it to her husband. For all Morris’s long friendship with the family (which included being a lifelong drinking crony of his patron, Rees Goring Thomas) Morgan did not hesitate. The poor man was confronted with the evidence, humiliated, and shown the door. Georgina had done the right thing and learned a useful lesson: she might not be the cleverest girl in the world, but she was certainly able to stir up passion in the opposite sex. Moreover, she had found a new way to make her father angry. Shortly after the incident, the Thomas family left Schloss Hard, still postponing London and heading toward Brussels.